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Sunday, January 25, 2015

A sankalpa, or
intention, is a set of words one says to one’s self before bed to feel happier
the next day.Two months ago, I learned
about sankalpas from Elephant Journal’s article Do These Five Things Before Bed and Wake UpHappier.According to the article, “It
is suggested that you decide on only one sankalpa, and that it be quite short
and phrased in a positive and not negative way. It should also be phrased to
indicate that success has already been achieved. So we should try to get at the
root of our deepest desires and goals, rather than focus on more superficial
ones.”

As I
did this practice, eleven times over the next three weeks, I mixed it with the
practice of giving thanks that the article mentioned.I also helped give myself support in finding
a girlfriend, keeping up with my school work, making money, learning to be
independent, and starting an autistic student group at my college, while with
each night, working more to get in touch with my Buddhist values.Over the next three weeks, I said these
eleven sankalpas.

November 17, 2014

May I continue forward with my life,

doing what needs to be done,

while enjoying the company of those around me,

and doing the things I enjoy.

November 18, 2014

I have continued to get a lot of work done,

while enjoying those around me and the time I have free.

I have figured out much about how to go about my
pursuits,

learned more about questions probing my mind,

given care to those around me,

and put stressful tasks to do from my mind.

May I continue to go forward with the same wisdom,
compassion, patience, and equanimity in my life.

November 26, 2014

I have continued to get more of my work done,

while still enjoying those around me,

and the time I have to myself,

and pursuing goals to help others.

I plan to go forward

with the same wisdom and compassion

for my education, personal life, social life, career, and
community work.

November 27, 2014

I continue to get more work done,

while still enjoying those around me,

and my time to myself.

I find enjoyment in my local resources,

continue to better understand people the way they are,

and move closer to my goals for the good of others.

I plan to go forward with the same wisdom, compassion,
inspiration, dedication, and discipline

for the good of my education, social life, personal life,
career, community work, and spirituality,

so I may continue to find beauty in the things around me,

enjoy the full potential of the relationships I have,

and guide people through a world full of uncertainty and
violence.

November 28, 2014

I give thanks for today’s bounty of family, productivity,
creativity, and the ability to help others.

I continue to get more of the work I have set for myself
done,

continue to find ways to build my future,

continue to be more creative in helping others,

continue to enjoy the world around me,

continue to enjoy the people I love,

better see people for who they are,

and give guidance to those around me.

I plan to keep finishing the work I have set for myself,

keep building my future,

and keep enjoying the environment around me of art,
literature, nature, friendship, and love

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

I don’t know about any of you, but I feel, living in a
mostly neurotypical family, society, and planet, that my “special interests,”
whether they be a books series, place to travel, hobby, or anything, lead me to
be patronized, labeled, belittled, and just plain misjudged.Your parents ask your psychiatrist what kind
of medicine he can prescribe to “stop me from thinking about it too much.”Your mother seems to know who you should
date, what you should watch, and even what career you ought to do.Everything you say seems to provoke them to
push you in some direction you don’t want because really they don’t understand
what you really think about certain things, the ways in which you appreciate
them, and how they really fit into your life, so I thought, after mulling
things over in my head as I do every so often, that I ought to write this post
dispelling many (though probably not all) the myths about special interests
that autistic people like me have.

1.Autistics have ONE special interest and it
stays with them their whole life.Really.I’ve had dozens of these special interests
during my childhood-gas/electric lamps, apes, trees-and most of them I’ve never
even thought of for the past fifteen years.Some lasted barely a week.When I
was a kid, I used to know all the different kinds of leaves in my
neighborhood.Not any more.

Furthermore, I have dozens of
interests today-photography, drawing, knives, instruments.I rarely spend more than two hours of my
spare time involved in any of these one things.Think of it like this: you may like pizza, but does that mean you have
it for every meal?

2.Autistic interests are, almost always,
“weird.”Here’s what I’ve liked over
the course of my life: elementary school I liked Pokemon; middle school I liked
Harry Potter; high school I liked The
Lord of the Rings.See a
pattern?I just needed Game of Thrones and I would have made my
point.

Let me talk about college for a
second.Here are some of my primary
interests: I like gender studies, literary criticism, media theory, art
history, social science.How many people
interested in gender studies, literary criticism, media theory, or art history
can there be at a four year university?

I’d like to make a point that I
have sometimes become interested in things my peers never shared my passion for
at the time.When I was in elementary
school, I had a fascination with apes.However, I, as with all of my peers from school went to our local zoo
and paid attention with them, and for me, they just happened to stick with me
for a while.I wasn’t interested in a
different thing.Just more so than my other peers.Today it seems like every other interest of
mine is either a block buster movie or ones of twenty other people surrounding
me.

3.Special interests encourage autistics to
“withdraw” from social activities.Autistics
don’t need special interests to withdraw from social activities.We have plenty of motivations that can make
us want to do that already-bullying, discrimination, lack of social skills,
needing time alone to process all that’s going on in our heads, trouble with
executive functioning.All special
interests are is really just a way to pass time while we do this.

4.Autistic people relate better to people
with shared interests.I once
thought this myself. When I was a
junior, I got a lot of flirtatious glances from a girl in an anthropology
class, and thought, What the Hell?We
have similar interests.She’ll probably
understand how I feel.Little did I know
she happened to be very needy, immature, and played all sorts of games with me
to get me to like her before I stopped trying to get with her.Today, my two best friends at school happen
to be interested in these two particular areas: computer science and
mathematics.They are probably the best
friends I have ever had and we hang out all the time, talking and
laughing.While it seemed that girl and
I might have shared similar interests, these two guys and I had more similar
personalities, approaches, and sense of humor.

5.Special interests make it hard for
autistics to interact with other people.Again, if you’ve read any popular literature that’s out there on autism,
you’d know that’s already hard for us.We don’t read facial expressions of body language, we speak bluntly and
hastily, we have a terrible need for exactness of schedules.But somehow, special interests get the axe
because parents and educators think that if we like something, that’s all we’ll
ever talk about.Did your special
education major friend from college only talk to you about FERPA and IEP?

I myself have plenty of other
ways of relating to my peers.We’re both
concerned about similar issues-dating, teachers, sex (yes, sex). We eat twenty piece McDonald’s chicken nuggets
together.We laugh, we drink, we go to
parties.Autistics have other ways of
relating to people than on a purely intellectual level. True, some of us, if you look at practically every news channel talk about autism, can go into a monologue like a street preacher. But the truth is, sometimes our special interests are all we ever really know what we're talking about on anything and we don't want to seem stupid.

6.Special interests are practically all
autistics ever think about.Actually
it’s a little more like this.Imagine
you are walking through town, you have a life-long passion for photography, you
see the perfect sunset, and you think, That reminds me of my perfect lover back
at home.Autistics don’t simply think
about these interests in exclusion to other things.They can simply relate them to what else is
going on in their lives.It’s like a
friend you meet at a bar and think, This guy knows what I’m going through.

7.These special interests will never be a
possible career for autistics.Except
for porn stars and drug dealers, every profession is important.We can’t live without it.We wouldn’t have food on the table if there
weren’t cashiers at the registers or managers to help run customer
service.Several autistics, such as
Daniel Tammet, John Elder Robison, Temple Grandin, Dawn Prince-Hughes, and
Lance Rice, have all made successful careers in areas of their choosing.Yes, autistics like these have had to “overcome
the lack of demand” for these professions, just as they have also had to
overcome epilepsy, PTSD, depression, unemployment, lack of education, and
government housing.Furthermore,
statistics indicate that nearly 70% of all Americans will work in at least five
different fields over their lifetime.What’s more, dismissing some of the autistic interests-animal
physiology, botany, explosives-tends to originate from the whole STEM mentality
(Science, Technology, Engineering,
Math), which I know from being in
the state of Kansas.But while these
jobs are important, they’re not enough for us to live on our own.We couldn’t know these things without
teachers, and we could never sell our products without economists who predict
the stock market in this ever-changing economy.Obviously, Temple, Robison, Tammet, and such have a demand for their
books because people just keep buying them.